Personal Assistant Lord Lucan

Personal Assistant Lord Lucan, LADY LUCAN has dismissed as “nonsense” the claim made in a BBC documentary aired tonight that her husband, Lord Lucan, started a new life in Africa when he disappeared from London in 1974 after bludgeoning the couple’s nanny to death.

“He was not the sort of Englishman to cope abroad,” she tells The Daily Telegraph. “He likes England, he couldn’t speak foreign languages and preferred English food.”

Lady Lucan – who believes she was actually her husband’s intended victim, and that he mistook the nanny, Sandra Rivett, for her in the dark – remains convinced her husband died immediately after the 1974 incident and that anyone who says otherwise is out to make a fast buck. “It’s so obvious he’s dead,” she tells the Telegraph.

However, tonight’s BBC Inside Out documentary includes a persuasive interview with Jill Findlay, the former personal assistant to Lucan’s great friend, John Aspinall, the casino owner who died from cancer in 2000.

Findlay claims that Aspinall and another mutual wealthy friend, James Goldsmith, asked her to make arrangements to fly Lucan’s two eldest children out to Kenya and Gabon so that their father could “view” them. Lucan did not want to risk meeting or speaking to them – he just wanted to be able to see them, she said.

“Instructions were to make arrangements for John Bingham, also known as Lord Lucan, to see his children and to do that I had to book his two eldest children on flights to Africa,” she said. “I don’t know the exact dates, it was between 1979 and 1981 and it was on two occasions I booked the flights.”

Findlay’s anecdotal evidence is supported by a former detective inspector, Bob Polkinghorne, who worked on the Lucan inquiry as a cold case in the 1980s. He tells the BBC: “I think his gambling fraternity friends spirited him out the country.”

Polkinghorne added that a reliable witness had confirmed Lucan was alive in Africa in the early 1980s but that permission to pursue the lead had been refused by the Metropolitan Police.

Chester Stern, a crime writer who spent years investigating Lucan’s disappearance, told the Sunday Mirror that he too found Findlay’s evidence “entirely credible”. Lucan would be 76 if he were alive now, and Stern believes he is living with a woman in Mozambique.